Numerous factors contribute to successful writing assignments, but
developing a sequence that allows students to incorporate skills they
have practiced in previous work with new skills they are trying to master
is absolutely crucial. In addition, a well-written assignment makes clear
to students what they are supposed to do, how they are supposed to do
it, who the students are writing for, and what constitutes a successful
response.

All approaches to teaching writing include some notion of what
assignments are supposed to do and be about, but few offer any principled discussion of sequencing. In both the current-traditional and the
process views, sequencing is usually linked to a taxonomy of behavioral
objectives and cognitive development through the various rhetorical
modes. Students begin with narration and description, producing personal-experience narratives or simple firsthand descriptions. They then
go on to definition, comparison-contrast, and process, until at some
point, they reach argumentation (see Lindemann, 1993b). Underlying
this sequence is the notion that rhetorical complexity and cognitive
complexity are essentially the same thing. In the current-traditional
view particularly, students are often considered incapable of coping with
abstract cognitive tasks, so classroom instruction focuses on writing
assignments that are deemed rhetorically concrete. However, cognitive
processes and language develop interactively, each influencing the other,
and they are not the same thing.

Effective teachers recognize that the distinct nature of rhetorical
complexity and cognitive complexity affects the way teachers sequence
assignments because the rhetorical demands of a task may be far
different from the cognitive demands. For example, close analysis shows
that true narration is perhaps the most rhetorically demanding of all
the modes, even though it may be less cognitively demanding than
argumentation. Beginning a sequence with narration therefore appears

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